QOTD -- Biting Predators

 

"...The collection of degenerates that make up Trump's cabinet makes sense mostly if you think of it as Trump, in his role as executive producer of the end of the American Century, casting the various roles in the cable news television programming he watches. These are, more or less without exception, people who would not be able to hold down a regular job; they are, all of them, instantly and obviously identifiable as predators, and the violence and harm that they have done to more or less everything they've touched over the course of their reckless lives proves it all out. But they are also the faces that have represented various broad archetypes—War, Computer, Medicines, Crime, Gold—on rightwing media, and this most avid and credulous consumer of rightwing media would instantly have understood them as credible.  [snip]

"But for all the ways in which this feels like the end, and all the ways in which it really represents something like the final surrender of a power structure that seems to have lost faith or just lost interest in itself, it is not actually an end. That cynicism, too, is Trumpian; the world will cease to matter to him the moment he leaves it, and so he is more than happy to decree that everyone and everything be buried alongside him. It will be important to remember the shame of this moment, both how it felt and how it worked, when it is time to build whatever will rise from it—to remember the blithe and brutal and self-delighted contempt with which this elite set out to devour every other better thing, and to work to build a life and a world that is not just strong enough to resist it but dedicated to its opposite." -- David Roth, in "Kingdom of the Biters" at Defector.com.  Using an anecdote from his previous worklife, Roth describes our current unholy mess as one created by predators ("biters") that victims (the voting public) failed to put an end to even after the first "bites" (Trump's first term/ J6/ the 2024 campaign).  A great read.